Enlightenment abolitionists could hold segregationist racism and antislavery views together

Evidence

Hume strongly opposed slavery, but like many other abolitionists of the Enlightenment period, he never saw his segregationist thinking as contradicting his antislavery stance. Ignoring his antislavery position, proslavery theorists over the next few decades used David Hume as a model, adopting his footnote to “Of Natural Characters” as their international anthem. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 248

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s stated discomfort that most well-meaning liberals occupy assimilationist or segregationist ground; Hobbes-style self-contradiction in famous thinkers. — connects to: Abolitionists against slavery could still defend segregation and white supremacy — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 260
• DEEPTHINKING: The tension that a thinker can oppose slavery while believing in permanent racial hierarchy — and that later writers laundered Hume’s footnote by ignoring his abolitionism — is a dense knot of moral-intellectual contradiction worth sitting with.